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Prime Minister Stephen Harper and elected Conservative Senator Bert Brown acknowledge a standing ovation at the start of a Conservative caucus meeting. Brown is one of two elected senators.Photo: Postmedia News, file

OTTAWA—Bert Brown has a sharp answer when it comes to Senate abolition.

“No,” he says. “Can’t be done.”

The outgoing elected senator from Alberta and the government’s point man in the upper chamber on Senate reform is adamant that reform is needed instead of abolition because without the Senate, Canadians could become subject to the dictatorial whims of a prime minister.

“It’s one of the five major institutions of the Canadian government and if you were to take that away, you’d just be creating a dictatorship,” Brown said in an interview in his office overlooking Parliament Hill. “Anytime you get a prime minister that won’t listen to anything but his own advice, you get some of the crazy things that we’ve seen.”

Brown also argued that without the Senate, and it’s intention to promote regional interests, prime ministers could ignore provinces where they did not receive votes.

“What I’ve finally learned in the last little while is we’ve had too many prime ministers that became their own dictatorship. Take a look at it. When you are young — reasonably young — and you’ve just become an MP, if you have any liking of the job at all, you’re not going to criticize the prime minister of the day. If you get to be a minister, you’re certainly not going to speak even against the prime minister,” Brown said.

“You have to have a way in which people can see what’s good and what’s not good and vote against the not good stuff and force them to understand that you can’t just decide to make one province rich because they made them rich in vote and there’s no counteract to that.”

It’s an altruistic vision for a chamber that has been mired in spending scandals where three senators — Sen. Mike Duffy, Sen. Patrick Brazeau and Sen. Mac Harb — have had their housing claims scrutinized by outside auditors. Auditors are also reviewing Sen. Pamela Wallin’s travel bills.

Brown retires from the Senate on March 22, ending his career in the red chamber without seeing his decades-long push for Senate reform coming to fruition. He argues that the time is still right for Senate reform, and points to polling numbers that suggest two-thirds of Canadians are interested in electing their senators.

An Ipsos-Reid poll conducted this year for Postmedia News suggested fewer people wanted to see the Senate reformed, and more wanted to see it abolished. The New Democrats have also called for the Senate’s abolishment, and Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair pledged to not appoint senators if his party forms a government — the same pledge Stephen Harper once made.

The government’s Senate Reform Act is being challenged before the Quebec Court of Appeal, and sees its future tied to the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which has been asked to rule on how, constitutionally, the Senate can be reformed or abolished. The Senate Reform Act would limit senators’ terms to nine years and create a voluntary framework for provinces to hold elections to select Senate nominees.

“When (provinces) begin to understand that there’s no challenge on that (provincial elections) — Quebec keeps on trying, but there is no challenge on that alone — it’s when you get into the place where you’re trying to do powers and when you’re trying to do numbers where there could be a challenge. The prime minister has put all of those challenges before the Supreme Court and I think he will win,” Brown said.

Brown is the second elected senator to take a seat in the upper chamber. Stan Waters was the first senator selected through a provincial election to sit in Senate. He was appointed by Brian Mulroney in 1990. Waters died in 1991, months after taking his seat.

Brown actually ran three times — successfully — in provincial Senate-nominee elections, but was left on the outside looking in for years. In 2006, shortly after Harper was elected prime minister for the first time, then-Alberta premier Ralph Klein told reporters he was happy his fellow Alberta Tory was interested in appointing elected senators, but added: “I would say this publicly and I don’t think I’m going to get in trouble: For God’s sake, appoint Bert.”

A year later, Brown was appointed to the Senate. Since then, he has worked with provinces and his fellow senators to grow interest in having an elected Senate.

Five provinces have laws, bills or plan to study whether to hold Senate elections, and Brown reads them off quickly — Alberta, B.C., Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and P.E.I. Brown argues that if seven provinces holding half the country’s population agree to hold Senate-nominee elections, there would be enough support for a constitutional amendment to allow for aspects of Senate reform.

“We have a pretty good chance of finishing it off,” Brown said.

The biggest one left is Ontario, Brown said, but argued that the province, which is tied at 24 with Quebec for having the most senators, will eventually come around to Senate reform because the population — along with political power — is moving west.

“Ontario will understand that what’s happening in the world is the four Western provinces are becoming more powerful than any other provinces in this country,” Brown said.